Turkish warplanes strike PKK targets in northern Iraq

ANKARA (Reuters) - Turkish warplanes bombed and destroyed nearly a dozen targets belonging to the Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK) in northern Iraq late on Wednesday, the armed forces said, the latest operations targeting insurgent camps near the Turkish border.

The F-16 and F-4 jets carried out the operation against the camps in the Hakkurk, Haftanin, Avasin and Basyan areas at 9 p.m. local time (1900 GMT), destroying 11 targets including ammunition depots and shelters, the military said on Thursday.

On Tuesday, warplanes struck shelters, caves and ammunition depots used by the Kurdish militants in northern Iraq and rural areas near the southeastern Turkish town of Semdinli.

Security forces also killed 10 PKK fighters on Wednesday in clashes in the southeastern towns of Nusaybin, near the Syrian border, and Sirnak, near the Iraqi border, the army said.

The military says more than a thousand insurgents have been killed in the largely Kurdish southeast since a 2-1/2-year-old PKK ceasefire collapsed in July, prompting the heaviest clashes in the region since the 1990s.

President Tayyip Erdogan has said that more than 300 members of the security forces have died, while the pro-Kurdish opposition says hundreds of civilians have also been killed.

Separately, the military said two soldiers had been killed and three wounded when a homemade bomb was detonated by remote control in Nusaybin. The town has been under a curfew since March 14, when security forces launched operations against militants there.

Late on Thursday, three Turkish gendarmerie were killed in a car bomb attack by the PKK on their station in Turkey's southeast, security sources said.

The attack, which wounded twenty-two gendarmerie, was staged on a gendarmerie station located between Diyarbakir and Bingol provinces and clashes continued after the attack, sources said.

(Reporting by Tulay Karadeniz, writing by Daren Butler and David Dolan; editing by Kevin Liffey and Andrew Hay)